I’m writing on behalf of my Daddy, who has cooked 1,414 last meals for America’s death row. His lawyers believe that my speaking on “his character” and “what his freedom would contribute” might help reduce his sentence, but honestly, your honor, do with him as you will. Daddy has run out of people to love, and I’m afraid parole will only let him get away with nastier crimes than what he got caught for. Though I do have one request: don’t take his cooking away. 

On our collect call last week, Daddy told me y’all took away his kitchen privileges because the inmates treasured his food too much. I hope you’ll reconsider. Making food for the destitute has been his life for the last 40 years. 

It started with Momma.

My folks met at the 1968 National Restaurant Association convention in their early twenties. Momma was the talk of Sheboygan that year. 

“Your Momma was the first Black woman we Wisconsin White boys had ever seen,” Daddy told me. “She was the only Black person at the convention. She and I were finalists for the Best-of-Show dish: my lettuce casserole versus her jellied pigs’ feet.” When he told me this story, his eyes softened. “She should’ve won. She should’ve won, not me.”

Daddy said Momma agreed to go steady with him for two reasons: one, he could cook anything, and two, a brain tumor was impairing her judgment. Before she discovered her cancer, they fell in love and ran a soul food joint named Melting Pot Cuisine in North Carolina. This wasn’t some rinky-dink rib shack, either. It was the first soul food restaurant to get a Michelin Star. 

I popped out in ‘71. Word-by-word, Momma’s mind unthreaded. By the time I could talk, she couldn’t. Daddy fed her chunks of soul food while she’d lie in bed, open-eyed. When her mind left, she couldn’t even swallow for herself. I saw her eyes staring up at him as he stuffed her mouth with thickened cinnamon grits. We had six years together before Momma’s tumor ate the last piece. 

I know his lawyer used this story at his trial, but don’t let it fool you. Daddy must’ve loved being relied on like that: he had to maneuver her sloppy jaw enough to force a swallow. Her eyes said she was full, but he kept on feeding.

***

Around the time Momma lost the ability to say our names, her cookbook was an international bestseller. She was the first Black female chef to have a book out, and Time Magazine called her “The Woman Who Finally Brought the Spice Trade to White People.” She was booked on nearly every daytime TV cooking show, but the only recording I was able to find was one where she was too sick to speak much. Her legacy and royalties left us plenty of dough (enough to make me the first 7-year-old in Guilford County to own a portable radio). Daddy got in the habit of not thinking about money, which he was never wise with anyway. After Momma died, all he worried about was making our food mean something virtuous. 

That next year, 1979, Daddy announced our new life’s mission. I was minding my business, grooving to Earth, Wind & Fire, stirring gravy at our family restaurant. Cooking had been my life’s only holy act. I had a stoop in the kitchen where I could peer out at our Melting Pot customers. They were mostly tourists. For years, folks from all over America would come to pay their respects to Momma, clamoring to try her famous red beans and rice or mock apple pie. 

Daddy took the whisk because I was stirring too slowly. “Listen, Boy. You’re getting grown—almost 9 years old. While you’re under my roof, I want to show you this country. I want you to see how much America really needs our food.”

“Can’t we see that just fine from here?” I said.

“We’re too crammed in here. There’s a whole world out there, and your Momma would want me to show it to you. I just got off the telephone with some boys who’ll sell this place for us.”

It made me hot hearing him say that so giddy; I wanted to eat the nearest biscuit just to spit it in his face. Melting Pot was our home. Momma’s home.

“We’re being pulled in a virtuous direction,” Daddy said. “I can feel it in my tenders, Boy. We’re going to buy Nucky’s Beefstro Bus. He’s retiring, and it’s a helluva deal. We’re gonna take that sucker on the road. We’re gonna feed the folk that America has chewed up and spit out.”

And that was it. He sold Melting Pot. 

We didn’t start with death row. Our first stop was Pennsylvania: we drove all the way there to serve fried chicken after the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown.

We slung free turkey gizzards and milkshakes to anti-Klan marchers at the “Death to the Klan” rally in Greensboro (before the supremacists opened fire). Daddy hated the Klan, and they hated him. During the march, one Klansman called him “a race traitor.” Daddy threw a sloppy turkey leg at him. I used to think he was playing it up for me, fighting the racists. Maybe he got mix-matched on his own color, always hanging around his Black son.

“How about you try a Black woman’s barbecue recipe for once in your miserable life, you cracker fuck,” Daddy screamed to the Klansmen. “Bet you’ll change your mind real quick.”

***

Daddy fell in love with the idea of serving prisoners in 1980. He said the incarcerated were the most in need of Momma’s recipes because of all the folks society chewed up and spit out, they got it worst—men turned to mincemeat. I think he just liked feeling mighty by going against the grain. He told me, “No one loves the prisoner except their family—if that. No one loves the prisoner like us.”  

Over the radio, Daddy heard there was a riot down in New Mexico’s state penitentiary, and we took our bus down there to help. 33 dead. Ain’t that something? We served Momma’s notorious tomato and mayo pie to everybody affected: families of both prisoners and guards. That version of Daddy is who I stayed loyal to: the young man who spoke like smooth jazz and would belly laugh after customers would say I can’t believe you did this with mayo or you gotta teach my wife a thing or two. Though I suspect he disappeared once we started serving the All-Stars of mass-murdering and kid-touching on death row.

Maybe this’ll earn him an ounce of clemency, but it has only ever been us. Every death row order from 1980 to his arrest in 2011 was prepared by Daddy and me. And I mean every single dish: from Bundy’s medium-rare steak to the Oklahoma City bomber’s two pints of mint chocolate chip. If a last meal was cooked in America, we were in the kitchen.

***

We drove to Indiana for our first death row dish: Steven Timothy Judy. I remember standing on a steel stool, steaming lobster tails for my first spree killer. I asked Daddy how I was supposed to know when to take the lobsters out of the water. He pulled out Momma’s cookbook. 

“Your Momma says, ‘When they’re egg white and opaque, take them bad boys out of the water.’” He lingered with the book, running his finger over the grease prints Momma left. 

He never let me hold his personal copy of her cookbook. Its back cover had a portrait of Momma circled in cranberries. I wish I loved her more, but I hardly recall her voice. I only have what Daddy told me about her. When he’d read her recipes to me, I’d watch her eyes on the back of the book—imagine she was with us.

Daddy squeezed his eyes, mumbled “mhm,” put Momma’s book down, and snapped out of his trance. “It’s a shame we won’t see his face while he eats,” he said. “This guy did shit that would churn the Devil’s stomach. He raped and strangled a woman who needed help replacing a tire. Then, he threw her three kids into a river. Killed ‘em all. Isn’t that the vilest thing you ever heard?”

“Then why are we making him prime rib and lobster?” I asked.

He didn’t like that question. I learned real quick not to ask those questions. 

Daddy got quiet and dusted paprika over the rib. “Because it’s what good people do.”

Steven Timothy Judy’s last words were, “I don’t hold no grudges. This is my doing. Sorry it happened.” And, your honor, you best believe Daddy let his prime rib take credit for that “apology.”

***

Daddy decided to homeschool me during our interstate drives. He said no public school education could match driving through every state. Behind the wheel, he’d play professor with big-headed stuff: patriotism, justice, law. At first, it was cool because Shazam comics were my textbooks. But when I hit puberty, his musing lectures turned into liquor-tongued rants. 

Early on, his rationale was, “We do this because we live in a country where violence and justice are synonyms.” That morphed into, “What about the innocent people that slipped through? A tasty meal would be the state’s only apology.” Then, “Maybe my peach cobbler will send them running into Jesus’ arms.” Until he spoiled into his simple slogan: “We must respect every dish. The principle speaks for itself.” 

No matter what the justification was, he wanted me to believe what we were doing was “respectable work.” That was Daddy’s most prized lesson: We could never just make a damn sandwich because someone was hungry. Every pickle laid on a bun needed to be for something. 

***

Between our death row visits, we’d set up shop in small towns, nestle our Melting Pot Express near hot springs, interstate Rockies, or a Texan Bluebonnet trail. We only did this for the money. Regulars, he’d call them, would flock like flies to honey. No matter the state, they’d say the same things: “This burger is Heaven on Earth.” “Did you put crack in this cornbread? It’s delicious.” “You and that little Black boy are the most gifted chefs I have ever seen.” 

“This Black boy is my son. His Momma was Black,” he’d correct. “And it’s her book I’m following.”

You’d think this public adoration would be enough for him, but it wasn’t. He told me the Regulars bored him.

“These recipes could mean so much more,” he’d say. “It’s not a Regular’s last meal. They treat our food like any other hamburger stand.” 

These stops in Regular America gave me an appetite for a life I couldn’t begin to dream of. I begged him to keep visiting those towns. “These are the only times I get to see other boys, Daddy,” I said.

“You’re 17. Getting grown. You can talk to whatever kind of people you want,” Daddy told me. He scratched at his thinning hairline. “As long as you clean up and come back by mornin’.”

***

Years down the road, I would meet a charming regular boy in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, who was the same age as me. 

Bell Buckle Boy adored our peach cobbler. His hair was the color of yams, and he had a pretty voice that sounded like a lute. We only had one night to see each other before moving to our next death row. He picked us a spot on the back porch of a general store. We had ice cream and peach cobbler in a rocking chair that was big enough to fit us both.

“I’ve been all over the country,” I whispered in Bell Buckle Boy’s ear. “I see regular people all the time, but you aren’t that at all. I’m happy Daddy let me have the night off from cooking to play.”

What I said struck him because he paused from eating his cobbler. He sparked his eyes at me and said, “You’re too old to be calling your Dad that. And you’re definitely too old to be calling this ‘play.’ We’re hanging out.” 

“Sorry. I don’t get much time with Regulars,” I said.

“Bet not. I don’t know how you and your Daddy managed to handle feeding half the town.”

That made me shy. I got up and wandered under the moonlight because I was trying to look as badass as the colorists made Black suit Spider-Man look in the nighttime. “We’ve had lots of practice feeding a bunch of people at once,” I said. I knew it wouldn’t be smart to share who we cooked for if I wanted him to like me.

“Does your Daddy always cook plastered?”

“He says as long as the food tastes good, shouldn’t matter how we make it.”

“Whew,” Bell Buckle Boy got up to reach for me. “Yeah, your Dad’s an up and down drunk.” His breath went frosty in the air. “No wonder you—actually, never mind.”

I learned it was best to ask boys more questions than they would ask me. Boys were less mean if they knew less. As much as my father messed me up, he never made me question my value. I always knew my importance to him—to his mission. 

***

It took Daddy until I turned 23 to finally start letting me drive the bus. At that point, his drunk driving was so casual that he deflated the driver’s side tires to compensate for veering into ditches. In my teenage years, I begged to drive, but he was too proud of his crusade to let a boy captain that ship. It wasn’t the drinking that made him give up the wheel; it was the shame that came after we went anonymous.

Word got out about who else the Melting Pot Express was serving. We had our first death threats from the fine people of Tulsa after they learned we expertly steamed two dozen mussels for a guy who strangled an 87-year-old woman with Christmas tree lights. The letters came in droves. We stripped the bus of its branding and never stopped for Regulars again. 

Those letters made me realize that I wasn’t the only one wondering why we weren’t cooking for the victims’ families instead. 

Honestly, Judge, I’m surprised Daddy didn’t get himself locked up sooner. His eggs got permanently scrambled after Aileen Wuornos only ordered a cup of coffee in 2002. I remember when he got the call. I could see it in his face: she’s really about to waste our talents? Does she know who I am, and who my boy’s mother is? But it’s hard to measure your dick over the phone. He made us drive to a fancy schmancy California coffee farm where he collected the grounds himself, then a 40-hour drive to Florida State Prison. Not sure if Regulars catch this, but on that trip, we learned that the palm trees in Florida are slightly more dead than the ones in California. Aileen died with the hugest grin on her face, and Daddy made his coffee take credit. 

***

Our first big argument came while we were preparing fried chicken and shrimp gumbo in an Illinois penitentiary in ‘94. 

As I deep-fried thighs, I asked him, “Do we have to make it taste that good?” 

He didn’t turn around from hand-battering the drumettes. I could tell he was angry by the sounds of him thumping the chicken against the cutting board. “Focus on your dish, Boy,” he said.

“I’m 23, Daddy. I ain’t no boy. And I’m being serious. What’s the harm in trying a little less? Would it be so bad to use paper plates instead of wheeling out Momma’s fine china?” 

“Do you still not understand the significance of what we’re doing?” 

My rage was boiling over. Why were we still doing something that made us lonely? No one knew who we were. Had 15 years of serving buttermilk pie to murderers not been enough?

“No,” I said.

“It’s called a last meal, for Heaven’s sake. The last meal.” 

My eyes scurried away from his; I was too scared to look at him. I spotted Momma’s cookbook next to his sauce pot. I had no idea what a mother would say, but—with the way my gut was knotting—I could feel that we both needed one. 

I told him, “I know you see this as your duty, but why don’t you take your talents elsewhere? Maybe we can teach a cooking class to the prisoners. Or maybe we can help more people outside the prison. Like Momma—she helped plenty of people follow their hearts with cooking.” 

He slammed his hand down, and the drumettes hopped. “Look at me, Boy. You look and listen as close as you’ve ever done in your life. That was not what your Momma did. Whoever came up with that follow-your-heart bullshit has killed more people than cardiac failure and diabetes combined. Don’t you see where ‘following their hearts’got the sons of bitches we feed? Do you want the fuck-face, kill-at-will, shit-eatin’, bastard fucks out there to be cutting off heads ‘cause they felt it in their gut? No. It’s not about following your heart, Boy. It’s keeping your heart from fucking everything up.”

 “Following your heart is what fucked everything up!” I snapped. He had lectured me for so many years, I decided to return the favor. “We’re cooking for a guy who killed and raped 33 boys in a clown suit, and there’s nothing this chicken bucket can do to help those boys. We bust our asses making amazing food because ‘it’s the civilized thing to do.’ Fuck civilized. You just want to prove you’re better.”

“Watch your mouth.” He got real quiet and real still. I could barely hear him over the oven fan.

“Oh, I do—I have for the last twenty years.” I had never had a tantrum, so I wasn’t sure if I was doing it right, but it felt good. “Why don’t we do what the people in those letters want—take these sickos into the woods, put a couple in their skulls, and leave their bodies as fertilizer?” 

Daddy never hit me; his “lack of a violent record” was one of the reasons your colleague cited for not giving him the maximum sentence. Though I speak to you as someone who has watched his eyes for 40 years: in that moment, he had the eyes of a demon. He looked at me with the eyes of someone who—if we had not been standing in a prison—would have only been chained by his lack of imagination. 

Daddy animaled his eyes, mumbled, “Give me strength,” then calmed. He turned back to his stove. “Is that what’s truly in your heart?” he asked.

I had no more words.

“Then leave,” he said. “Leave me to continue sharing your Momma’s recipes.” He tapped her portrait and went back to stirring in silence.

(I could smell that my shrimp was nearly ready.) His choice to tap the photo bothered me. It was such an obvious thing to do, using her against me. It was a childish move to tap it, to make it so obvious. (The gumbo needed more garlic.) The movement was subtle, but somewhere along the ride, sliding between our years together, his voice became too weak to stand up to the air. His words would sink and fall at his feet. The same anger I had known for years, now delivered in tender mumbles (onion and bell peppers, too. I needed to add more of that to the gumbo). 

I returned to the dish. In my gut, I felt a version of him that I had never met was waiting for us—all we need is a few more come-to-Jesus moments, I thought. As if there were butterflies rumbling beneath his cracks.

***

I had my husband review the parts above, and he said I should include as much as I can about the night Daddy was arrested at the cemetery. I wanted the last time I told this story to be at the trial, but if Daddy truly wants me to talk about “his character,” here goes. 

In 2011, Lawrence Brewer and his buddy were on death row for killing a Black man who spoke to a White woman at a party. They hitched this man (his name was James Byrd) to the back of their truck and dragged him to death. 

Here was Brewer’s last meal order: a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, three fajitas, a pound of BBQ, a half-loaf of white bread, one meat lover’s pizza, one pint of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream, a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers. Daddy and I worked all night and drove all day. It made me sick. 

Daddy didn’t spend a lot of time lecturing about race, but he didn’t need to. I saw people who looked like me and Momma behind bars my entire life. With the internet, I had grown accustomed to seeing the faces of Black men on death row being exonerated weeks away from their deaths. 

On the same day we were to serve Brewer, a Black man named Troy Davis was about to be killed in Georgia for a crime he didn’t commit. Daddy chose to serve Brewer over Davis that day. His excuse: “Brewer is the worse man, and a country’s honor is found in how it treats its worst people.”

I was furious, but fury got me nowhere. I decided I would put a loogie between Brewer’s burger patties. With all that saturated fat and fried lard, how was he going to notice? 

While we were alone at our stations in the prison kitchen, I tried being sneaky. I raised Brewer’s hamburger bun and hocked a spit. But Dad’s ears weren’t as bad as I had expected.

“What the fuck are you doing?” There was a bass in his voice I had forgotten he was capable of. He picked up a sauce pot and started toward me. 

I was 40 then—too tired to be fragile. I stared into his eyes. “All this for a lynching man. And you married a Black woman, you coward.” 

I waited for a slap that never came. His onions were blackening, but he only wavered there like a caught fish wiggling against the oxygen. His arms slacked, and he returned to his BBQ sauce without speaking.

***

Brewer didn’t eat a bite. Not a damn nibble of it. It broke Daddy. We went into Brewer’s holding room with trash bags and Tupperware and saw the landscape of untouched food. Daddy took his hat off and started stomping it.

“That son of a bitch, son of Satan—whore, motherfuck, twisted—oh Hell isn’t hot enough, cracker bastard bitch! Wasted this luxury!” Daddy spit in his hat and kicked it across the floor. “Wasted my peanut butter fudge. Oh, I hope that bastard felt every drop of that poison.” 

After deciding the hat had enough, he pulled out the metal chair Brewer had sat in and started spitting in the seat. It was almost funny watching him let go of his anger to hurt something, even if it was only a steel chair. I was expecting an unleashed hellhound and got a cartoon character instead. Then, as always, he shut his eyes tightly, mumbled “mhm” to himself, and his trance broke.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “Maybe we could give all this food to someone else so it doesn’t go to waste. We can ask the warden to get us in touch with the family. Well, I don’t know—you think they’d be offended by the offer?”

Daddy’s eyes went hollow. He stood silent.

“In a way, it might mean something more now,” I said.

“No.” He picked up a piece of bacon and held it with his eyes closed. “I’ll keep it for now. Thank you for the idea, Son.” 

***

The next day, he let me hold his copy of Momma’s cookbook for the first time.

“Look in the back,” he said.

Behind the back cover were bank account numbers with a note in the most delightful handwriting. It said, “Keep this savings account for our little boudin ball.” 

It was a selfish first thought, but when I first read her note, I imagined how nice it would’ve been for Momma to teach me how to write that pretty.

Daddy took my shoulder. “Write those numbers down. I’m keeping the book. Leave $25,000 in there for me. The rest is yours. Buy a car and go up to Georgia to help the Davis family cook. Use your Momma’s apple pie recipe. Those poor people up there—they need help. I’m gonna stay in Jasper for a while.” 

“Are you done?” I asked.

“I’m done. I made a promise to feed the wicked, and Brewer got away. He made me fail our mission.” His voice was smooth. “You don’t need to come back. Imma stay here and watch that bastard Brewer get buried.” He hid his eyes. “Love you. You grew up into such a kind man.” It was almost tender.

I left his side for the first time at 40 years old.

The bank account had $714,000 in it, and the bank was eager to have someone less volatile take over. I wanted to find out who I was outside of that bus. I never left Daddy because nothing in the Regular world seemed as simple as cooking. Why would I struggle through college when I could just clean chitlins and make Daddy happy? Why would I want to get married when a tumor would just kill my lover? But outside of the stink of the Melting Pot Express, my dreams finally started stirring.

***

On January 27, 2012, my bank notified me that a large withdrawal was taken out by Daddy in Jasper, Texas: a check for a Hitachi ZX27 Mini Excavator. The bank woman said “landscape tank” was written on the memo line. 

I took a plane back to Texas the next day and arrived in Jasper that night. It was a small town, but it had dozens of cemeteries. I drove all day, checking each one until I found the Melting Pot Express parked outside one gate at 3 AM. It went deep into the pines.

I checked inside the bus. It was the rankest it had been in 35 years. In the driver’s seat sat Daddy’s copy of Momma’s cookbook—it looked like the book drove them here. In the passenger seat, there was a mound of paper and a Jack Daniels. I rifled through and found hundreds of newspapers, obituary printouts, and microfilms. They were cutouts of White people, clippings about the Brewer trial, and documents with dozens of names circled. 

On the bus floor, there were strips of tar-black fajita meat with holes where maggots had burrowed, blue bread, slices of pizza filmed in custard fungus, and so many flies that the moonlight shining in from the window couldn’t penetrate their swarm. I vomited until the freezing air closed my throat. I stood there for minutes, catching my breath and listening to the Texan crickets scream over the tombstones. I looked past the cemetery gate and felt Daddy was out there. 

When I walked in, I saw holes everywhere. Everywhere. My gut knotted. Several plots were left untouched, but the entire graveyard looked like a prospector’s field. Way out there, I saw the arm of an excavator reaching up to Heaven. 

I heard him before I saw him, but I only caught a few words: “keep. . . good . . . grace. . . seasoned. . . honey. . . Oh, America. . .”

He was howling lowly from a hole underneath a “Brewer” tombstone. There were empty Tupperwares strewn about. I stepped closer and saw a ladder and his chef’s hat bobbing out of the hole. 

“Try this bacon, Boy,” Daddy was speaking in a lullaby voice. “You White boys thought you were gonna get away with it. No, no, no. Not on my watch. Just wait. Just wait. You ain’t going nowhere ‘til you taste what we made you.” 

Daddy was too absorbed to hear me creep to the edge of the hole. He was an animal—a muddy, desperate, old animal. There was so much dirt on him that his white skin had become like zebra stripes.

I called down to him.

He cut his song in a snap. His blue eyes darted to me. He was holding Brewer like a lover. Chunks of rotted meat were spattered on the corpse’s dress shirt and tie. 

“Daddy.” I could barely speak. “What are you doing?”

He seemed more confused to see me than I was to see him. He assembled himself, switching his eyes from me to Brewer. Then, he spoke as sweetly as I ever heard him do. Last time he sounded that warm, he was feeding Momma when she couldn’t lift her arms.

 “I dug em’ up,” he told me. “Every one of his family members buried here. Men like this—that hate don’t come from nowhere. It’s a family rot. It was too easy letting him go like that. I hope I got them all. Can you imagine how evil he was, dragging that Black man to death? I just hope I got them all, the cousins, grandfathers, the few supporters I could—”

“Daddy, get on out of there. Let’s get you some help,” I whispered.

“No, Son. I’m right as rain, I swear.” He let go of Brewer and stood up. “I wanted to share your Momma’s recipes with the folks who needed them the most. I thought her soul food could help them like it helped me—help them taste justice. It’s never been about food. We do this for her message.” 

All I could do was shiver.

“Here,” he raised his handful of maggot meat. “You wanted to spit in his food, didn’t ya? Now’s your chance. Give it all you got. He deserves it.”

Twenty-five counts of Abuse of Corpse, $10,000 fine for each, and 20 years in a Texas penitentiary. 

***

Sorry for the length, your honor. I needed to get a few things off my chest. It’s been 10 years since that night, and I still can’t shake it. I thought if I wrote what we went through, I’d be able to see if I loved him even with all he did. When I bring my husband to visit him, I catch a glimpse of Momma in his eyes—what I fantasize to be Momma. I try loving that. 

Of course, I’m no expert on character anyhow. I spent a 40-year childhood road-tripping with him and a bus filled with serial killer cutlery, surrounded by cops, criminals, and chicken meat. My husband stands me, but I can’t tell you why; I’m still nothing like the Regulars. He asked me the other day why Daddy felt so strongly about food, and I couldn’t answer. Can you believe that? I’ve known him better than anyone ever has during his 70 years of life, and I still don’t know anything deeper about him than his secret recipe for coleslaw.

Maybe this is our kind of love: sticking with each other for no particular reason because a mother—a wife—died for no particular reason. All I can say for sure is that the fog in his eyes is clear when we visit. He can’t admit that he needs this. He was too prideful to let his lawyer claim temporary insanity. Now he’s too prideful to admit he’s exactly where he deserves to be. 

I beg you to keep him locked up, but please let him maintain his cooking privileges. Please let him keep making meatloaf for his pen-mates. And, if it’s possible, can you return him the enclosed copy of Momma’s cookbook? Without her exact measurements, he always goes overboard on the chili powder.